06:27 pm - Bonfire of the HumanitiesI was saying before that I think basing access to education on parental income rather than intellectual ability and achievement demeans education itself. I think it demeans it in two ways. It is bad that the highest awards are not given to the most competent students, of course, but more damagingly, this lowers the status of competence itself. If student ability is not the deciding factor in determining progress, then competence becomes something of secondary consideration (almost by definition).

I think that the establishment of private universities such as AC Grayling's New College for the Humanities is a symptom of a degradation of the idea of education.

British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.

Plus why is Stephen Pinker the Philosophy tutor? He doesn't even have a degree in Philosophy. It just makes me think they are picking 'famous people' to attract money. Like paying to go to a dinner with celebrity speakers.

I also have a prediction which is that Pinker, Dawkins, Grayling and Peter Singer will spend 0.01% of their time teaching at this place, while creaming in the ££££s off the poor saps who have paid to rub shoulders with them.

Comments:

From Crooked Timber: 'a lot of the press commentary appears to have inadvertently implied that these academic megastars will be doing the teaching. But, sharp cookies will have noted, none of them appear to have resigned from their existing posts or given any notice that they intend to do so'

Some of the comments to the Guardian article are interesting. The typical right-wing view that people should be free to spend their money on education if they want to and that it's nobody else's business but their own. I just hope this sinks into obscurity and will never be seen as an elite institution for high-flyers.

I'm struggling to put into words how I feel about this. Not anger, just utter, utter dismay.

I think these guys have made a misstep, akin to when BBC stars move to ITV for more money. I think what they have done is quite a bit worse than moving to ITV (in itself a blameless move) and think how careers have been damaged by that. The British public are funny.

"Although NCH is a humanities institution, the idea of bridging the CP Snow gap as much as possible - and in particular to bring extended examples of serious, disciplined, evidence-and-reason-based scientific styles of thinking into the humanities curriculum - seems to me tremendously important. It is great that Richard and our other science colleagues are involved with NCH in this way, and I hope we reinvigorate the attempts sporadically made in the past at other institutions to demand of humanities students that they get a good acquaintance with scientific ideas."

On one level, if someone's stupid enough to pay £18K a year to be taught by Niall Ferguson that's their problem. That said, anyone involved with this should be ashamed of themselves, hopefully sufficient to go jump off the nearest cliff. I cannot begin to express just how angry those bastards have made me. Terry Eagleton does a much more eloquent demolition job here

d'oh, just realised you'd already linked to the Eagleton. Thing is it's not going to be just the students who are being ripped off, it's their parents as well. I wouldn't mind so much, if the more money than sense brigade were being scammed to fund the rest of the system, but no, it's going to line a few pockets. I wonder if the academics involved realise just how much damage they're doing to what's left of their reputations? Probably not

The widespread and consistent reaction I am seeing makes me think this will collapse. Dawkins in particular is no fool, and he's still got a few years in him, he won't wreck it all for this. Once he jumps it's just a matter of time.

This is SC's view - that the whole enterprise is doomed to failure, particularly because the grandstand lectures will be interspersed with who-knows-what kind of 'teaching assistant' and as a result is not a sustainable 'high-end education' model. He doesn't think that the loose, and possibly temporary, attachment of these famous folks will be enough to build a brand that truly tempts the most able young people in the way that Oxbridge /ought/ to (debates about admissions aside for the moment).

But like altariel, I think that the UK is not the target market - it ain't situated in Bloomsbury for nothing...My own sense of despair is rooted in how quickly this sort of effort has come into being since the coalition came into power. It used to be that Buckingham was a sort of freaky fringe 'thing' - I worry that this will now become mainstream.

I don't really understand what the problem is. I've never heard of most of these celebrity academics, but if they are such wankers then surely they won't be missed. And if their rich punters are so deluded, then they won't be missed either. Just let them get on with it. The degrees they award will only have value if we choose to accord it to them.

The real point is that this sort of venture wouldn't even be considered if we were funding the public education system properly.